Then the Earth shook: Blast effects reach across all of Indianapolis

Nov. 18, 2012

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Teenagers' webcam captures sound of Indianapolis e...: Jessie Wright, 15, and sisters Maddison and Mikeala Toloday, 16 and 15, were making this webcam video on Nov. 10, when an explosion four miles away interrupted.

Citizens Energy workers continue their investigation Monday afternoon by digging into the front sidewalk looking for possible explanation into the explosion at 8300 of Fieldfare Way in the Richmond Hill subdivision. / Matt Kryger / From WTHR Chopper13

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A man celebrated his birthday with friends around a backyard bonfire under a starlit sky about to be set ablaze.

A group of girls, up late on a Saturday, made faces into a webcam for a movie soon to have an action scene.

A mother rocked a sick child to sleep.

A nurse tended a patient in a hospital.

An old woman slept.

For so many people within a radius of the blast that erupted on Indianapolis' Southeastside, it was a Saturday night winding down quickly. Many folks were in bed -- some slept, some watched TV.

At 11:08 p.m., the sound wave from the explosion moved the needle on an earthquake sensor in Martinsville -- almost 30 miles from the blast.

About that time, CaraleeGriffith, 38, was stretching out on her couch and trying to stay awake long enough to watch the nightly news when she heard the blinds on her French doors rattle. She thought an intruder was breaking into her house.

That was in New Palestine -- 10 miles from the blast.

Jessie Wright, 15, was making a webcam video with a couple of girlfriends when, as they were goofing in front of their laptop, a tide of noise washed into the room, sending Wright and her friends scampering out of the frame. The scene gave the illusion of a world being jostled.

That was in Franklin Township -- 5 miles from the blast.

For Sally Winegard, a registered nurse at Franciscan St. Francis Health Indianapolis, this was no illusion. She had just wheeled a sleeping patient into a room on the sixth-floor orthopedic/neurologic unit when the shock wave hit the building.

Winegard’s first thought was that a plane had slammed into the hospital.

That was on Emerson Avenue, near I-65, about a mile from the blast.

John Hancock, celebrating his 42nd birthday with friends around the bonfire, soon was staggered by the boom he likened to a cannon but then wondered if a jetliner had crashed.

“You felt the backyard rock,” he said.

That was on Sunburst Court — about three-fourths of a mile from the blast.

Nathan Lashbrook, with his girlfriend’s family, was in the middle of asking the whereabouts of a blanket as they watched TV when he was cut off in mid-sentence by an all-encompassing noise. His ears rang. Dust spurted out of air vents. Like so many people that night, he thought a car had crashed into the house.

Lashbrook, 24, ran outside. Front porch lights were flicking on all the way up the street.

“You feel that?” he shouted to a neighbor.

“Yeah,” said the voice coming back to him. “It shook our whole house.”

That was on Ivory Way — half a mile from the blast.

Almost instantaneously, the social seismographs of Facebook and Twitter began to light up with people asking the same question: Did you hear that boom?

Yes, they had.

Within minutes, #Indyboom was born and being thumbed into Twitter messages that kept pouring out until after daylight. The moniker was much more lighthearted than what was happening at the source of the boom, the Richmond Hill subdivision.

***

Built in the early 2000s by the now-defunct Davis Homes, Richmond Hill is the definition of a tightly packed suburban community. About 125 homes are shoehorned into 30 acres of Perry Township, near the intersection of Sherman Drive and Stop 11 Road. Most of the houses are separated by no more than 15 feet.

Typically, the homes feature brick facades on the front with vinyl siding on the other walls. Of the nine sold in the past year, the average price was $150,000.

With a pool, a pond and a clubhouse, it is a neighborhood suited to young families but also is home to empty nesters and some retirees. It is an address for teachers and nurses, artists and car salesmen, and any number of others living middle-class lives. In their neighbors, some saw friends. Others saw people they smiled and waved at in passing, neighbors with first names only.

In one blast, their relationships abruptly changed: They were a community in crisis.

***

The first 911 call about trouble in Richmond Hill came in at 11:10 p.m. Hundreds more would follow.

Despite the scope of the blast, there was initial confusion about where it came from. At least one crew of responders followed a call to another subdivision, most likely someone reporting the sound concussion.

The name of the street that proved to be ground zero — Fieldfare — was initially reported as “Fairfield,” leading to some confusion in the radio traffic that now can be found on YouTube.

Within three minutes, though, the first crews rolled into Richmond Hill.

They found chaos.

“We have one house down. We have two others severely damaged. We have possibly two others minor,” said a first responder, offering one of the first pictures of the scene.

“I’m on the street called Alcona, and we have extensive damage to a lot of houses along this area, and we have a lot of frantic people back here,” a responder reported.Indeed, the scene across the neighborhood was becoming surreal.

A fire raged from the heart of Richmond Hill. Floodlights and flames gave a glow to the billowing smoke that could be seen for miles.

Within minutes, on the unseasonably warm night snowlike flakes of shredded insulation and larger chunks of siding and roofing materials began to fall. In some places, the insulation pooled into small drifts.

Under foot, glass crunched like thin puddles of ice. Five-inch fire hose lines snaked through backyards. And emergency vehicles lining the narrow streets formed a tunnel, flashing pulses of light that were nearly seizure-inducing.

Residents of Richmond Hill began to walk out of the neighborhood in bedroom slippers and bathrobes. Some toted children in their arms or led pets on leashes. Dogs and cats fled through doors that had been ripped apart, running on adrenaline until they were lost.

As the neighborhood began to expel residents, it also became a magnet for gawkers.A hundred people gathered at the Sherman Road entrance to the neighborhood to watch the action. Teenagers walked through fields and a nearby pumpkin patch to get a closer view.

***

To William Ray, it wasn’t a spectator sport.

In a home on a short cul-de-sac just inside Richmond Hill’s entrance, Ray was in bed watching television when the curtains over his bedroom window fluttered, a noise more powerful than he could describe consumed the house, and, it appeared to him, the walls flexed.

His wife, Helene, had been in the room of their 2-year-old daughter, Tayven, trying to rock the sick child to sleep, and their 6-year-old son, Jazper, was asleep in his own room.

With the blast’s arrival, Ray bolted out of bed, ran to his wife and daughter, then to his son and found them OK. But he instantly felt weighed down by “a load of panic.”

The best he could come up with was to leave. The Rays got dressed, grabbed a few things and loaded their kids and their dogs into the car. Around them, people were running around in the street. Ray thought a plane had crashed, except that he hadn’t heard the whine of a dying engine.

It occurred to him that it could have been a gas explosion, and he went back into his house to turn off the lights. He went back again to grab a change of clothes. When a neighbor needed help, he darted into their home to retrieve a dog leash.

“Finally,” he remembers, “we just said, ‘Let’s go.’”

Along the neighborhood’s south side, Roz Aldridge, 56, had been watching television with her son Zach, 19, when they were rocked out of their chairs by the blast. Pictures and mirrors on the wall fell to the floor.

“I was terrified,” she said. “Absolutely terrified.”

On the east side, 76-year-old Patricia Blechl was in bed sleeping peacefully when she heard what she could only describe as a bomb going off. She jumped up immediately.

Blechl went to her living room and saw that a kitchen cabinet had been blown off the wall, spraying the room in glass. Her front door had been blown open. Her sliding patio doors were blown in different directions — one inside, one out.

She found her daughter Kay, 56, and told her to get dressed. They got in her car. But a firefighter soon told them to pull over into a stranger’s driveway to make room for emergency vehicles. A cop ferried them to the evacuation site, nearby Mary Bryan Elementary.

Glenn Olvey, who had been watching television, was thrown from his living room into the kitchen. His wife and two teenage daughters, who had been nearby, were trapped under a fallen roof, fire officials say.

Soon, two teenage boys from the neighborhood appeared and dug out Olvey’s daughters, and an off-duty firefighter from Lawrence came in to rescue his wife. Olvey got out on his own.

Six days later, on Friday, an investigator from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found their cat, Gidget, hiding under a couch.

The Olveys, it turns out, were next door to the blast epicenter — a home that belonged to Monserrate Shirley, 47, who was out of town when the blast hit. Her home was obliterated.

The two deaths in the explosion came one door south of the blast.

Dion and Jennifer Longworth, an audio engineer and a schoolteacher in their mid-30s, never had a chance. Their home was smashed by the blast and engulfed in flames. Their bodies were discovered in the rubble within a few hours.

Their funeral is set for Monday at St. Barnabas Catholic Church, where they were married.

***

After Richmond Hill’s longest night, daylight offered little comfort.

Of the 125 homes in the subdivision, 86 were damaged. Five homes were destroyed, and 10 incurred major damage. The price tag on the disaster is estimated at $4.4 million, but that’s likely to rise.

The debris field revealed the extent of the devastation: Cars were burnt to a crisp sitting in their garages. A brick facade remained as the lone representative of the home that once stood behind it.

Scattered about were leather desk chairbacks, bundles of Christmas bulbs and smashed pumpkins.

Yet a week after the explosion, no cause for the blast has been officially determined. Natural gas was likely involved, investigators say, but the disaster site also has been inspected by bomb and explosives experts.

Into the void of information, speculation and rumors have flourished that it really was a plane crash, a meth lab or perhaps a missile fired by a CIA drone, as one website now proposes. A man from Texas phoned The Star to say he had had a premonition of such a calamity in a dream.

However, most of the focus has fallen on Shirley, the owner of the home at 8349 Fieldfare Way.

Shirley has had financial troubles. She pulled her house off the market after it didn’t sell.

She and her boyfriend were out of town for the weekend visiting a casino. Her daughter was staying with friends. Their cat had been boarded. Neighbors said a truck parked in front of the house for some time was moved on the afternoon of the blast. Shirley, attempting to quell the rumors, gave a series of interviews to local news media last week. They didn’t seem to stop the questions coming her way.

Richmond Hill residents, who have been getting to know each other much better through their ordeal, say the speculation has been painful. But they say they are heartened by and grateful for the help from the community.

Off-duty firefighters, police officers, nurses and soldiers flocked to the scene that night to offer help in the rescue and with traffic and crowd control.

Within an hour of the blast, nearby Mary Bryan Elementary became a place of refuge for about 200 people from Richmond Hill. A local American Red Cross volunteer showed up with supplies.

Within an hour, people who had been following the news at home showed up with food, water, clothes, shoes, diapers, blankets and even offering the refugees a place to stay. A limo service showed up to offer free rides to anywhere. By morning, when the donations had filled the school gymnasium, a moving van company offered three vans to haul the items to Southport Presbyterian Church.

The church has become the nerve center for the relief effort in a way that city and church leaders say they hope is a model for future disasters that may strike.

“It’s pretty heartwarming to see our community come together. And I wouldn’t expect anything else from Perry Township,” said Mary Bryan Principal Dana DeHart, who says 18 of her students were displaced by the explosion. “I feel like we always take care of each other.”

Even so, residents from Richmond Hill say the blast has unsettled the peaceful existence they once enjoyed.

Blechl was heartened that her wedding china from 1959 and her grandmother’s crystal survived a blast that left most of her everyday dishes smashed on the floor. But after not being able to imagine moving out of the neighborhood she has grown to love, the blast has made her rethink material permanence.

“I think it does something to your body,” she said. “It seems like it is not so terribly important like it was before.”

Ray, an artist and graphic designer, said he and his wife have been holding their kids a little closer since the blast. And he, like others from the neighborhood, says he feels a bit “on edge.”

“Just the initial power of it was just so unbelievably powerful I can’t explain to anybody how it felt,” he said. “Anytime something falls down or something falls over, you jump. You feel like anything could explode.”

Others seem to share the concern. Around the city, reports of gas leaks have been rampant since the blast.

When he returned to his home on the periphery of the subdivision, Ray said he had the gas company come relight his pilot light, something he normally would do himself.

The only thing that he expects to bring real peace, Ray said, is an answer to the big question.

What caused the explosion?

Nick Hlavaty, a Richmond Hill resident who was in Chicago when the blast occurred, came back immediately and, without a place to stay, joined his neighbors in the school shelter the first night.

Soon, he began to talk with neighbors he never had spoken to before. He expects the people of Richmond Hill to be closer after this experience, but he doesn’t recommend it to other neighborhoods.